Do you know what the fix provided by Compaq was?  I'm not familiar with GWBASIC so I don't know what flavor shell it is trying to open.

What I'm wondering is if this is a new incarnation of a very old program.

GWBasic was provided as part of a bundle with PC clone computers beginning in the 1980's.  It was a DOS based Basic interpreter that was sold with the computers having the generic MS DOS operating system.  Functionally it is identical, or close to identical, to the Basic A interpreter that was sold with the original IBM PCs.

If this is the original GWBasic, it would be necessary to run it in a DOS box in Windows XP or later, and it might not run at all.  If this is a new updated version of the program, I'm not familiar with it.  I found this site that talks about running certain programs in Basic on newer machines:  Scientific Programs Written in BASIC for PCs.

The version of GWBASIC we have been using for years is 3.23. It works fine in a command prompt window in XP on assorted Dell computers, including a Vostro 1000 notebook with an AMD chip we just got in (there goes the AMD vs Intel theory). We have about 100 small programs written in it for doing assorted little utility jobs like printing labels to a dot matrix printer. Yeah, old stuff but regular old hammers still work for driving just a few nails. The programs are measured in 100's of bytes and are easily modified, no compiling. I have downloaded a few "DOS box" programs but have not tried them yet because I don't like solutions that call for having one more thing running in the background slowing the computer and acting as a possible source of conflict for some other software.

I have not investigated the Compaq fix much since every reference I found about it is for Compaq computers but I shall investigate that more now that I know that at least one computer with an AMD chip works.

Rjmccorkle,

You mentionned that most of your programs are measured in 100s of bytes.  You might want to take a look at Just Basic.  It's free and available from www.download.com or www.justbasic.com.

Hope this info helps.

Tony

Thanks Tony, I downloaded it and will see how it works and what it will take to port the GWBASIC programs over. If it supports Windows printers so I can get away from LPT redirection the whole mess I have gone through might be worth it.

Update on more experiments: I took a third C521 I have at home, made an image file before starting, downloaded the Compaq fix and tried it. It did not fix the problem with GWBASIC and as far as I can tell did not mess up anything else. At least no smoke coming out of it. Then I tried DOSBox, a program written to supply a DOS environment in Windows. It worked on the test computer but is a bit tricky to use since each drive to be accessed has to be mounted and assigned a drive letter, including the C: drive, and a path has to be established (AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS are sort of combined in one .CONF file that is used when DOSBox is started). When I tried it on one of the work computers using the same .CONF file that I used at home, it did not work and I have not had time to debug it. If I get it to work I'll report back.

Bob

Bob,

I downloaded Just Basic for a similar reason.  I have an optician who uses a lens calculation program originally written by an optometrist in BASICA on an IBM PC in 1985.  With XP, we were able to use GWBASIC and DOSPRN to basically use the lens calculation program as it was originally written.  So far, we haven't been able to use the program with Vista.  Hopefully, I can rewrite the modules in Just Basic.  I'm having no problem using the lprint function to print text to my Dell 962 AIO printer.  I've used many different versions of BASIC over the years. I started with TI Basic, then Commodore, Applesoft, Mbasic (CPM), Basica, and GWBASIC.  Occasionally, just for fun, I crank up Mbasic with a Kaypro CP/M emulator on a PII Gateway running Windows 98.  It brings back some fond memories of just how much fun I had before Windows came along.

Tony